Click image to start London aerial virtual tour

With great pleasure I am pleased to show off our latest virtual tour. Following our trip in Africa where we shot over 50 aerials, we were delighted to put these skills to use and create an aerial virtual tour of London.

Inspired by the fantastic photography of Oleg Gaponyuk and design by Pixelcase, VR Web Design are proud to be the only company in the UK offering HD Aerial Virtual tours from helicopter.

Follow our route from Millenium bridge to Battersea Power Station, this tour provides you with a birds eye perspective of London, that few have experienced before.

Enjoy !

MuTATE BRITAIN are an art events movement run by a group of friends and collaborators representing different tribes in British society. MuTATE BRITAIN are The Mutoid Waste Company and The Cordy House Family.

TIP: click ‘fullscreen’ button, then right click on the panorama, and select ‘little planet’ view.

MuTATE BRITAIN – One foot in the Grove 1 in London

This is a stereographic image made from a 360 degree aerial panorama of the 02 Millenium Dome that I am currently working on:)

Panoramic photo by Tom Mills.

For 100 days and nights, 2400 people from all over the UK are taking turns to be a live statue for 1 hour. 360 Cities were contacted by live statue ‘Helen Butcher’ who was raising money and awareness for the Fibromyalgia Association. She had the great idea to do a 360 degree panorama from the the forth plinth, but needed some help to do it. I was very happy to help out and lend her my equipment and stitch together the results of her shots, and donate the images to raise money for her charity. I think she did a great job ! You can see Helen’s hour of fame on the plinth and the shots being taken by visiting the one&other website She is also hosting this panorama on her website, http://www.astatueseyeview.info where she will be selling this image and others in order to raise as much as she can for the Fibromyalgia Association You can make a donation to Helens fundraising effort at justgiving.com/fibro-on-the-plinth

Ever wondered what it would be like to be a Statue in Trafalgar Square ? Well… now you can, as part of the ‘One & Other’ live art project by artist and sculptor Antony Gormley. For 100 days and nights, 2400 people from all over the UK are taking turns to be a live statue for 1 hour. 360 Cities were contacted by live statue ‘Helen Butcher’ who was raising money and awareness for the Fibromyalgia Association. She had the great idea to do a 360 degree panorama from the the forth plinth, but needed some help to do it. I was very happy to help out and lend her my equipment and stitch together the results of her shots, and donate the image to raise money for her charity. I think she did a great job ! You can see Helen’s hour of fame on the plinth and the shots being taken by visiting the one&other website She is also hosting this panorama on her website, http://www.astatueseyeview.info where she will be selling this image and others in order to raise as much as she can for the Fibromyalgia Association You can make a donation to Helens fundraising effort at justgiving.com/fibro-on-the-plinth

The tour features music, image gallery and much more….

Visit now by clicking the image below

Well now those fears have been allayed and I am delighted to report that click online have discobverd the virtues of armchair tourism and made a feature for there Webscape news item.

Click the image below to find out what they said…

360 Cities featured on BBC

VR Web Design were commissioned to do a Flash virtual tour of 105 locations in Uganda, including 45 aerial panoramas from helicopter. The tour makes use of the very latest features made possible from KRpano, including 3D sound, 3D video, and xml photo galleries. As well as a Flash virtual tour we are also providing a Google Earth virtual tour and a 5 mintue video comprising of both.

Among the panoramas I enjoyed getting were over Murchison falls and of wildlife along the nile, mainly hippo, crocs, and a couple of elephants. It was great for me to go back to Africa as I had travelled overland for 4 months when I was 18 and it was the place that really inspired me to become a photographer and travel. VR Web Design hope we get many more commissions like this.

The virtual tour for Tullow Oil will appear only on their intranet site, but I hope they will give permission for me to share a few images here. The tour

Cancer Research – Race for Life in London ’s Regent Park on Saturday saw 5,000 women running the 5 kilometer course in aid of the charity. It was a great event, well organized and well emotive, a bit like the London marathon many people are running for or in memory of someone they know who have been touched by the disease.

Here is a 360 degree handheld panorama near the finish line. Congratulations to all those who raced and well done to the crowd for there great support !

First off, thanks to ‘Psykotik’ for his helpful tutorial “how to add a search function for next-gen gallery”
Also many thanks to a kind soul called ‘AengusM’ and his very clever girlfriend. Aengus has it working on his site too, he does some great underwater photography Aengus has his search set up to search images only and I have mine to search images and posts. I will try and explain both.

Look for a search.php file in your themes template folder, if you dont have one you can make one by copying the code from index.php and save as ’search.php’. Open your search.php and look at the code. You are looking for the line

 <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>,

Once you have found it paste in the following code underneath.

get('s');
	$keywords = preg_replace('/\+/',' ',$search);
	if (function_exists ('ngg_get_search_pictures')) {  // function from functions.php
		$nggpictures = ngg_get_search_pictures($keywords, ''); // put the number of pictures by row you want, if you don't want "4"

		if ($nggpictures) {
			echo "

<h2>Pictures</h2>
";
			echo $nggpictures;
		}
	}
}
?&gt;

Then open your functions.php file and paste in at the bottom the following code

## Function to do searches on gallery pics from NextGen Gallery plugin
##
## 2 vars : (1) $keywords (usually coming from the standard search query from wordpress)
## (2) $numberPicCol (number of pic by row, if null it takes 4 )
function ngg_get_search_pictures ($keywords, $numberPicRow = NULL) {
global $wpdb;
$count=1;
if (!$numberPicRow) { $numberPicRow = "4"; }

$nngquery = "
SELECT pid,description,alttext
FROM   wp_ngg_pictures
WHERE  MATCH (description, filename, alttext) AGAINST ('*$keywords*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
AND exclude = '0'
UNION
SELECT pid,description,alttext
FROM wp_ngg_pictures, wp_terms, wp_term_relationships
WHERE pid = term_id = term_taxonomy_id and
MATCH (name) AGAINST ('*$keywords*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
AND exclude = '0'
";
$pictures = $wpdb->;get_results($nngquery, ARRAY_A);
if ($pictures) foreach($pictures as $pic) {

$out .= '';
$out .= '<img class="ngg-gallery" style="border: .1em solid #FFFFFF" title="'.stripslashes($pic[alttext])
.'" src="'.nggGallery::get_thumbnail_url($pic[pid]).'" alt="'.stripslashes($pic[alttext]).'" />';
$out .= "\n";
if ($count == 0) {
$out .= "";
}
++$count;
$count%=$numberPicRow;
}
return $out;
};

This code should solve some of the following issues that I’ve heard a few people have, like image thumbnails not aligning horizontally and resulting search images not hyperlinked.

If you would like to display just pictures and no posts then simply remove

from your search.php

Although this system works it is by no means perfect and you may get some wayward results. However I believe that a more intergrated solution with next-gen is not far away. Check wordpress forum for updates.